Undermining Israel’s digital resilienceThe Jerusalem PostThis is an age of propaganda. Throughout the world, states, groups and individuals are utilizing and manipulating digital platforms to spread false information, sway public opinion and undermine social cohesion. While the methods of propaganda have …

One of the most memorable lines from the fictional television show Arrested Development is “I may have committed some light treason.” In Donald Trump’s all-too-real criminal scandal, many of the developments these days are arrests, so perhaps it’s fitting that Trump is now essentially floating the “light treason” defense – and he’s even borrowing some of the verbiage.

Here’s what Donald Trump blurted out on Twitter this morning, in response to yesterday’s devastating developments: “Oh, I get it! I am a very good developer, happily living my life, when I see our Country going in the wrong direction (to put it mildly). Against all odds, I decide to run for President & continue to run my business-very legal & very cool, talked about it on the campaign trail. Lightly looked at doing a building somewhere in Russia. Put up zero money, zero guarantees and didn’t do the project. Witch Hunt!”

Wait, so he’s admitting to the accusation that he looked at building something in Russia, while he was running for president, with the specific Russian officials he knew were plotting the election in his favor – a conspiracy against the United States if there ever was one – and he’s saying it’s okay because he only lightly looked into it?

This is indeed something straight out of a fictional television show. The trouble is, Donald Trump’s version isn’t particularly witty or clever, and everyone is getting rather tired of watching it. Trump has reached the stage where he’s “lightly” admitting to his crimes, in the hope of minimizing them, which means that he knows he can no longer pull off pretending he didn’t commit them at all. If nothing else, this means we’re nearing the series finale.

Counsel for the House of Representatives have filed a response to James Comey’s motion to quash a congressional subpoena issued by the House Judiciary Committee for closed-door testimony on how he handled the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s email server and the Trump campaign’s alleged ties to Russia. Comey’s motion is available here. The House response is available here and below.

Former FBI Director Comey Sues to Quash House SubpoenaThe Epoch TimesFormer FBI Director James Comey asked a federal court in Washington on Nov. 29 to block a subpoena compelling him to appear for a closed-door interview with House lawmakers. Comey filed a motion with the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia …and more »

When the news broke that special counsel Robert Mueller was ending Paul Manafort’s plea deal—because the former Trump campaign manager, according to prosecutors, had repeatedly lied to them during his supposed cooperation—President Donald Trump and his champions had reason to cheer. This seemed to mean that Manafort, who pleaded guilty to multiple felonies, would no longer be providing Mueller and his team with information. In response to the collapse of the Manafort deal, Trump rage-tweeted about Mueller and claimed that “heroes will come of this”—possibly referring to Manafort. (He also said a pardon for Manafort was not “off the table.”) But there were others beyond Trump and his fans who may have had cause for welcoming the end of Manafort’s agreement with Mueller—namely, two oligarchs with whom Manafort has done or talked business.

When Manafort first cut his deal to tell all to Mueller’s squad in return for a lesser sentence, federal prosecutors, according to a Manafort associate, expressed interest in what he could share with them not just about the Trump campaign and related matters but about a pair of oligarchs who have been investigated or sanctioned by US agencies: Russian Oleg Deripaska and Ukrainian Dmytro Firtash. And when Rick Gates, Manafort’s former business partner who was deputy campaign manager for the Trump presidential effort, arranged his cooperation agreement with Mueller’s office, he, too, was questioned about these two men. Neither Manafort’s spokesman nor Gates’ lawyer responded to a request for comment.

Deripaska, an aluminum magnate who has been cited as a close ally of Russian leader Vladimir Putin, does not face any public criminal charges in the United States, but he was sanctioned in April by the Treasury Department and accused of using his businesses as an arm of the Russia state. He and Manafort go way back. In the mid-2000s, according to the AP, Manafort did secret work for Deripaska that he told the oligarch would benefit Russian leader Vladimir Putin. The news service last year reported that Manafort “proposed in a confidential strategy plan…that he would influence politics, business dealings and news coverage inside the United States, Europe and the former Soviet republics to benefit the Putin government.” In 2006, Manafort signed a $10 million annual contract for the project. (Deripaska brought a defamation lawsuit against the AP in US federal court over this article—and lost.)

For years prior to that contract with Manafort, Deripaska had been of interest to US officials. In the 1990s, he was denied entry to the United States, due to US officials being concerned he was connected to organized crime—an allegation Deripaska denied. Eventually, Deripaska won a visa for travel to the United States, but that was revoked in 2006 by the State Department, according to the Wall Street Journal “after officials from the Justice Department concluded that Mr. Deripaska wasn’t being candid with them about his past business dealings.” (In 2009, Deripaska made two secret trips to the United States to meet with FBI agents about a criminal probe, details of which are unknown.)

Throughout this period, Manafort maintained a business relationship with Deripaska that eventually led to an apparent falling out. The billionaire handed Manafort nearly $19 million to invest in a Ukrainian TV venture called Black Sea Cable, according to legal filings submitted in the Cayman Islands by Deripaska’s representatives in 2014. Yet, Deripaska claimed, Manafort and his associates, after taking his money, stopped responding to Deripaska’s queries about the fate of the funds. In essence, Deripaska was accusing Manafort of absconding with millions.

During the 2016 race, Manafort seemed to try to use his position with the Trump campaign to work out his differences with Deripaska. After he was named the campaign’s chief strategist, Manafort sent an email to Konstantin Kilimnik, a business partner and former Russian intelligence officer, and asked, “How do we use to get whole?” And in an apparent reference to Deripaska, Manafort later wrote Kilimnik, “If he needs private briefings we can accommodate.” In another email exchange, Kilimnik told Manafort that he had “several important messages” from a person who seems to be Deripaska.

Working with and for an oligarch once banned from entering the United States and who now is sanctioned, owing him money, being sued by him, offering him inside info on the Trump campaign—Manafort appears to have had a complicated relationship with Deripaska. Surely, anyone investigating contacts between the Trump campaign and Russia would want to dig into this connection. Moreover, if the feds are interested in Deripaska’s past or present activities, Manafort might be a productive source for them.

Federal prosecutors also believed Manafort could be a source of information on Dmytro Firtash. Last year, the Justice Department identified Firtash, a Putin-connected Ukrainian natural gas magnate, as an “upper-echelon [associate] of Russian organized crime.” (In 2008, Firtash told the US ambassador in Kiev that years earlier he had to get the approval of Semion Mogilevich, an alleged Russian mobster, for his initial business endeavors—but denied having a close relationship with Mogilevich.) Firtash now faces federal charges in Chicago for allegedly bribing Indian government officials to secure a contract for selling titanium to Boeing. He is currently in Austria fighting extradition to the United States. The matter is before the Austrian Supreme Court, and Firtash, “could face extradition in a short time frame” if the court rules against him, his legal team said in a court filing last month.

Manafort is not implicated in Firtash’s current legal troubles. But a decade ago, he discussed with him an $850 million project to redevelop New York’s Drake Hotel—a venture that was to be partly financed by Deripaska. And in a federal lawsuit filed in 2011—and amended and expanded later—Yulia Tymoshenko, the former prime minister of Ukraine, charged that Firtash and Manafort had met to discuss a proposal for the oligarch to invest $100 million in a global real estate fund. As part of that deal, the lawsuit alleged, Firtash would pay a $1.5 million fee to a firm owned by Manafort and a real estate executive who had once worked for the Trump Organization. “Manafort gave Firtash the opportunity to expand the scope of his money laundering activities into the United States,” the suit claimed. But the case was dismissed in 2015 on jurisdictional grounds—and no evidence of a Firtash-Manafort money laundering scheme ever was produced. The Drake Hotel project never materialized, and there were no public indications that Firtash went ahead with Manafort’s global real estate fund.

Lanny Davis, an attorney for Firtash, says that Firtash did talk to Manafort about real estate investments: he “listened and said no” to Manafort. Firtash, according to Davis, has no concerns about Manafort providing information about him to the feds. (Kenneth McCallion, the American lawyer who filed Tymoshenko’s lawsuit, tells Mother Jones that FBI agents working with Muller’s investigation have repeatedly asked him for information related to allegations in that dismissed case and that he has provided them with material.)

Manafort possibly had another link—or, at least, an overlapping interest—with Firtash, who made billions as a middleman for Gazprom, the Russian natural gas giant. Firtash reportedly made donations to pro-Russian politicians in Ukraine, including former Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych, who Manafort served as an adviser. Manafort made millions of dollars consulting for Yanukovych, a corrupt pol who fled Ukraine in 2014 and yielded the presidency.

Mueller says that Manafort was paid for his political work in Ukraine in part by oligarchs through offshore companies set up in Cyprus and elsewhere. The scheme led to Manafort’s conviction for tax evasion and his guilty plea to money laundering charges. There is no evidence that Firtash was among the oligarchs who paid Manafort. But Gates disclosed during Manafort’s August trial in Virginia that he and Manafort received payments from Serhiy Lyovochkin, who was Yanukovych’s former chief of staff and an occasional business partner of Firtash. Gates said that at Manafort’s behest he forged paperwork to pretend the payment from Lyovochkin was a loan, a step to dodge US taxes.

Lyovochkin has drawn attention from Mueller for another matter. In August, Sam Patten, a longtime Manafort associate, pleaded guilty to acting as an unregistered foreign agent for Ukraine, and he agreed to cooperate with Mueller. As part of his plea deal, Patten admitted that he arranged for an unnamed straw donor to pay $50,000 to Trump’s 2017 inauguration on behalf of a Ukrainian official. The description of the official, unnamed in court papers, matches that of Lyovochkin. The website of Lyovochkin’s party says he attended Trump’s inauguration.

Manafort might be in a position to say whether any Ukrainians were involved with donations to the inaugural committee or GOP campaigns.

So for years Manafort hobnobbed with controversial oligarchs who were on the radar screen of US law enforcement. It is not publicly known what information Manafort handed over to the feds before Mueller killed his plea deal. But prosecutors were interested in what he had to say about Deripaska and Firtash. Whether or not he spilled any important beans about them before his cooperation agreement blew up, Deripaska and Firtash—and maybe other players in Russia and Ukraine—probably ought to be relieved that Manafort is talking to Mueller no more.

After pro-Trump Republican Congressman Jim Jordan lost his bid several days ago to become House Minority Leader, he was more than eager to accept the role of House Judiciary Committee ranking member as a consolation prize. Then yesterday, immediately after Michael Cohen incriminated Donald Trump in the Trump-Russia scandal, Jordan suddenly announced he was no longer seeking the role. So what happened?

When the impeachment process against Donald Trump inevitably gets underway, by rule it’ll begin in the House Judiciary Committee. Based on the partisan nature of these things, incoming Democratic Chairman Jerry Nadler will lead the initial charge for articles of impeachment. The GOP ranking member on the committee will, by default, be Trump’s main initial defender. That was going to be Jim Jordan, who has spent a lot of time and effort corruptly trying to get Trump off the hook in his Russia scandal. Now it’ll conveniently be someone who isn’t as far up Trump’s backside.

Jim Jordan has told the media that he withdrew his name after the House GOP leadership informed him that it would be going in a different direction for the House Judiciary Committee ranking member position. If this is just a cover for Jordan bailing on the gig, it would mean Jordan has concluded that Donald Trump no longer has any chance of surviving, and he doesn’t want to stick his neck out any further for Trump’s sake. If Jordan is telling the truth, it would mean that the GOP has decided it doesn’t want a corrupt Trump lackey in the role, because it doesn’t want the party dragged down with Trump.

Some will point to the fact that Jim Jordan has his own severe problems, including his disgusting role in covering up the sexual abuse scandal at Ohio State, and that there are a lot of reasons for the GOP to not want him in such a prominent role. But until the minute Michael Cohen opened his mouth this morning, all indications were that Jordan was likely to land the gig. The timing here can’t be ignored. This is all about Trump’s rapidly diminishing prospects for surviving this.

This is part of a series of essays from the Crypto 2018 Workshop on Encryption and Surveillance.

The world is waking up to something that digital security experts have known for a very long time: Digital security is hard. Really hard. And the larger and more complex the systems, the more difficult it is to plug all the security holes and make them secure and trustworthy. Yet security is also increasingly important in systems ranging from the smartphones in our hands to our power grids. So why isn’t everyone—especially the governments of the Five Eyes countries—promoting, supporting, and celebrating important security work? In part, it’s because law enforcement in each of these countries wants to take advantage of the same security holes that criminals do—a result that puts us all at risk. Even worse, many of these governments are now pushing companies—both through both law and through nonlegal pressure—to ensure that any future technology that the public relies on continues to have security holes they (and criminals) can use.

Creating systems of trust and real security for users should be all hands on deck, from government to the private sector. We need to encrypt the web, secure data at rest and in transit, and ensure that homes, cars and anything that can be connected to the internet are safe and trustworthy. The array of options is poor since security architects have to bolt security onto insecure systems. But that’s all the more reason to encourage people who understand how computer security works (and how it fails) to help. After all, there are only so many hours in the day, and the more attention we pay to these problems, the faster and better we can address them.

It’s not just individuals and private institutions who should be focusing on improving security for users, of course. Governments should be shouldering their responsibility for public safety by leading, incentivizing and, in places, even legally mandating real digital security for their increasingly vulnerable citizens.

But they are not. While the U.S. government has pushed hard to make sure that companies give them information about security problems—in the Department of Homeland Security’s Information Sharing and Analysis Centers and in the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act passed in 2015, for example—there has been very little information or tools coming back to protect the public as technology users. This is even as we’re pushed into a world that increasingly relies on the internet for every facet of our daily lives. It’s also as the consequences of losing control of our data grow larger and more dire. Digital networks are now increasingly coming into our homes and cars. There are pushes to move to online voting, to the horror of security experts. The vast majority of us carry our phones with us everywhere; with them comes access to a tremendous amount of intimate information about us, our loved ones and our business and personal associations, both stored on the device and accessible through them.

The government should generate, incentivize and support efforts to build a more secure and trustworthy internet, along with the devices and services that rely on it. Instead, law enforcement in the U.S. and elsewhere too often demonize companies and individuals that offer strong security and pressure them to offer worse tools, not better ones.

There’s a history here. In the 1990s, the U.S. government nonsensically stuck with the Digital Encryption Standard (DES) long past the time when it was broken. In the 2000s, the NSA secretly placed security weaknesses in software we all rely on through a program called Bullrun. The government’s goal has been to the preserve its ability to access any conversation or data of anyone around the world. But each time the government has tried to publicly mandate access, from the Clipper Chip in the 1990s to the more recent Burr-Feinstein “Compliance with Court Orders Act,” it has failed. That’s because citizens and companies want strong security and recognize the obvious fact: There’s no way to weaken encryption for the government’s purposes without weakening it in ways that lets bad guys in too.

Recently, we’ve seen a change in tactics by the governments of the U.S., Australia and the United Kingdom. Rather than the strategy that the FBI used in attacking Apple for offering strong encryption on the iPhone, these governments have shifted to promoting efforts to weaken our security in ways other than by weakening the encryption. One goal seems to be to convince the world’s leading cryptographers and security researchers to “fix” the problem of strong security preventing governmental access by creating or using non-encryption security weaknesses. The end result is that the public is still insecure, just through different mechanisms so that the governments can crow about how they support strong encryption while still not supporting strong security. Sadly, some researchers are taking the bait. Several were featured at a workshop on technical and policy aspects of encryption and surveillance at this year’s Crypto conference in Santa Barbara.

Why are these governments pushing in the direction of claiming to embrace strong encryption? The reason isn’t technical; it’s about a policy fight in Congress, in parliaments and in governmental agencies around the world. As hard as they’ve tried, law enforcement has not been able to overcome the overwhelming consensus of security experts—from academics, industry experts, even former government officials like Michael Chertoff and Michael Hayden—about the importance of strong encryption to digital security. Despite several years of pushing technologists to “nerd harder,” there has not been a single serious security expert who thinks that we can build a system at scale that allows the government a way to break the encryption on networks and devices that doesn’t leave all of us at risk to bad actors. Government reports and private reports alike agree on this.

So the governments are trying another tack. The push is to convince a few cryptographers and security experts—and they only need a few—to “fix” this problem by finding ways to access information secured by cryptography without actually breaking the cryptography. To date, these efforts all involve some quite clever ways to say “we support strong cryptography” by undermining the very reason that people want it in the first place, for security.

During the Crypto conference, the U.K. government described a basic strategy called a “ghost,” although the better term is “stalker.” The idea is to insert a secret participant into a conversation or create a secret “approved device” to connect to a targeted account or a device and obtain the sought data. So you as a user think you’re just talking to a loved one, but the government is secretly listening to your conversation. Or you think you’re just syncing data from your phone to your laptop, but your data is being copied to an unseen government device. The cryptography remains as it was, but the trust in the security of your system—that users know who is listening to their conversations or getting access to their data—is broken. The U.K. government has openly acknowledged that this “stalker” strategy is its preferred approach to eavesdropping on encrypted systems like WhatsApp and iMessage.

In a similar vein, the Crypto conference also included a few high-level technical presentations for “tainted update” systems. These rely on technology companies providing their users with compromised security and other updates. Most are variations on the old, discredited key-escrow ideas, some with hardware pieces along with software. The major shift is that companies rather than governments hold the keys.

None of these ideas—the new “stalker” idea or the old key escrow idea with some new window dressing—has been well-vetted, much less demonstrated on the scale that modern digital markets require. But aside from the technical concerns (and there are many), each of them turns on betraying the trust the public needs to have in the companies that provide us with our tools, including critical security updates. And we can be sure that if one of them is deployed, it will be in secret, with gag orders preventing the companies from informing their users, meaning that the bad guys may find it and begin secretly using it to steal from us without us ever knowing.

So why should security professionals resist the government’s siren song? Why should they spend their time and energy answering the broader public need for trustworthy end-user security rather than responding to the government’s desire for ensured access?

First, a practical reason. There are only so many hours in a day. Time spent undermining security, even if today’s undermining is a little less dangerous than yesterday’s, trades off with time spent making the internet safer. We urgently need to make the internet more secure for end users. While the security field is large, and thankfully, growing, the problems are also multiplying while growing more complex. The number of academics and thought leaders in security who tackle these issues broadly is still relatively small. Efforts that make us less secure, or less secure than we would otherwise be, are headed in the wrong direction, even if they aren’t quite as bad as earlier ideas.

Second, regardless of how technically clever they are, these approaches cannot solve one of the key nontechnical problems with the law enforcement’s wish for ensured access. Even without compromising the cryptography, there is no way to allow access for only the good guys (for instance, law enforcement with a Title III warrant) and not for the bad guys (hostile governments, commercial spies, thieves, harassers, bad cops and more). The NSA has had several incidents in just the past few years where it lost control of its bag of tricks, so the old government idea called NOBUS—that “nobody but us” could use these attacks—isn’t grounded in reality. Putting the keys in the hands of technology companies instead of governments just moves the target for hostile actors. And it’s unrealistic to expect companies to both protect the keys and get it right each time in their responses to hundreds of thousands of law enforcement and national security requests per year from local, state, federal and foreign jurisdictions. History has shown that it’s only a matter of time before bad actors figure out how to co-opt the same mechanisms that good guys use—whether corporate or governmental—and become “stalkers” themselves.

Moreover, even assuming a “government only” strategy, if this access is created for the U.S., U.K. or Australian government, that capability will be demanded by China, Egypt, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and other governments with far less due process and other protections. The truth is that governments around the world have very different standards and practices for when they believe they should have access to private data. Yet a company having built this capability would find itself having to decide which of those standards are good ones and which are not, or else face the fact that they are facilitating human rights abuses and repression. Conceptually, before we can have a global technology infrastructure and global trade in technology that ensures access to communications and data, we need to come to global consensus about the circumstances in which communications privacy should be violated. No amount of technology can protect against this core legal and policy issue.

Third, these “ghost,” “stalker” and “tainted update” approaches all undermine the trust that people need to have if we’re ever going to get out of our current dismal security hole. Under it, users will rightfully worry that every change in their system might be undermining their security, secretly adding another listener into their conversations, secretly adding another device to their approved keychain or secretly siphoning copies of their data away. But security is a process, not an end state. Everyone using digital tools needs to be able to trust that the companies that create them are not working for one government or another (or many). Users especially need to be able take and apply security updates and other patches without fear. But all of these approaches compromise that trust. They turn our technology providers into secret governmental agents. The Big Brothers of any number of countries around the world won’t just be watching us from afar: They will be in our very pockets.

Finally, this is fundamentally an attempt to shoehorn a policy debate into a technical question. Having failed to demonize cryptography, law enforcement wants to say that expert security professionals differ on the question of whether the government can preserve the ability to eavesdrop on every private, digital conversation without touching the cryptography. An initial proposal from Ray Ozzie along these lines, for instance, was greeted with an enthusiastic quote from law enforcement on Wired celebrating: “[T]he fact that someone with [Ozzie’s] experience and understanding is presenting it.” But the question of how much risk we should create for individuals—not to mention whether we can tolerate undermining the trust necessary for secure systems to function—in order to ensure ubiquitous eavesdropping capability is not fundamentally technical. It’s a matter of policy. That’s obvious from Ozzie’s shrugging response to questions about how companies should handle responses from repressive governments.

People with digital security skills should be working to encrypt the web, secure our data whether at rest or in transit, ensure our homes, cars and anything that can be connected to the internet are safe and trustworthy. They shouldn’t use those skills to undermine our security or try to find clever ways of undermining it just a little less.

In freeing up encryption from government regulation in the late 1990s, the Ninth Circuit recognized that our privacy was slipping away: “Whether we are surveilled by our government, by criminals, or by our neighbors, it is fair to say that never has our ability to shield our affairs from prying eyes been at such a low ebb.” There’s a strong argument to be made. that since then, our ability to protect our privacy has further eroded, taking our basic security along with it.

Security work is more important than ever. I urge our community to spend its time and talents making the digital world safer rather than demolishing what trust and security still remain in our technology, our devices, and our infrastructure.

The link between Crime, Terrorism, and Migration is very real!

“Washington Post”, get rid of your obvious and misleading liberal bias and face the truth. There is no doubt, in my very humble opinion, that in the present circumstances the borders (all of them, physical and virtual) have to be strengthened. “Wall or no wall”, this country has to protect itself from this pre-orchestrated, planned, hostile “invasion”. This issue, in a long term perspective, affects the demographic composition, and, inevitably, the mind, the soul, and the essence of this country. The comprehensive immigration reform is needed to bring the order and sanity into this system. It is a bipartisan issue. The best way to deal with it is to assist the future migrants at the places where they already are, be it their own or the third countries, and to help them with the adjustment and making the rational and orderly plans for emigration or non-emigration. It will also be much more efficient, including the comparative costs of the prospective interventions vs. non-interventions options for the migrants’ assistance.

In its present state, the dysfunctional US Immigration system does breed crime and definitely linked to it, the courtesy of the various Intelligence Services, among the other factors, the terrorist activity.

Do the methodologically correct studies to reveal these connections!

It is also difficult not to see the larger and the deliberate design (I wish I would know, by whom) which can be described by this imaginary phrase: “You, Americans, deal with your own problems at your southern borders, and we will make sure that you continue having these problems; and we: the Germans, the New Abwehr, the Russians, the “Europeans” will deal with our own problems at our southern borders, which includes the Middle East, Syria, Afghanistan”, etc., etc. Very straightforward and clear, almost German in its artificial simplicity and squareness, design. The Strasbourg attack was the latest demonstration of the “Terrorism – Crime – Migration Nexus“, as it was aptly described and defined.

The recent events (US withdrawal from Syria , (even if largely symbolic but telling: “А вас тута не стояло“), and the planned withdrawal from Afghanistan confirm this line of thought further. “Theories of a crime-terror nexus are well established in the literature. Often conceptualized along a continuum, relationships between organisations range from contracting services and the appropriation of tactics, to complete mergers or even role changes. Recent irregular migrant movements have added to the nexus, providing financial opportunities to criminal enterprises and creating grievances and heated debate that has fueled the anger of ideological groups.” This pattern is reported for Europe but there should not be any significant reasons to believe that this constellation of forces and factors and their dynamics are any different in the Western hemisphere. The Statistics should help to clarify the issues, not to obscure them. And the reporters might be tempted to spin the numbers into any direction they want, just like anyone else. Let the specialists, including the statisticians, comment on these matters. The incompleteness and narrowness of the press reports like the one linked above only throws more oil into the flames and allows if not justifies the Trump’s criticism of his press coverage as the “Fake News & totally dishonest Media” and the “crazed lunatics who have given up on the TRUTH!”. (What a horrible crime! Right out of the mouth of The TRUTH Teller In Chief!)As far as “the enemy of the people”, this might be the more debatable attribution. So far. (The New Abwehr’s control of the Global Mass Media notwithstanding.)

Exploring the Nexus in Europe and Southeast Asia by Cameron Sumpter and Joseph Franco Abstract Theories of a crime-terror nexus are well established in the literature. Often conceptualised along a continuum, relationships between organisations range from contracting services and the appropriation of tactics, to complete mergers or even role changes. Recent irregular migrant movements have added to the nexus, providing financial opportunities to criminal enterprises and creating grievances and heated debate that has fuelled the anger of ideological groups. In Europe, terrorist organisations have worked with and sometimes emulated organised crime syndicates through involvement in the trafficking of drugs, people, weapons and antiquities. In Southeast Asia, conflict areas provide the backdrop for cross-border drug trafficking and kidnap-for-ransom activities, while extremist groups both commit crimes for profit and target criminals for recruitment. Keywords: Crime-Terror nexus, organised crime, terrorism, migration, Europe, Southeast Asia –“Fake News & totally dishonest Media concerning me and my presidency has never been worse,” Trump said in the first of the tweets. “Many have become crazed lunatics who have given up on the TRUTH!”